Metrics of positive Ricci curvature with large diameter (Q923388)

It is well known that a complete n-dimensional Riemannian manifold with Ricci curvature Ric\(\geq n-1\) has diameter \(d\leq \pi\) and that the first eigenvalues \(\lambda_ 1\) of the Laplacian on functions satisfies \(\lambda_ 1\geq n\). If \(d=\pi\) resp. \(\lambda_ 1=n\) then the manifold is isometric to the standard sphere. Now one can ask whether there is a universal constant \(\epsilon =\epsilon (n)>0\) depending only on n such that a complete n-manifold with Ric\(\geq n-1\), \(d\geq \pi -\epsilon\) resp. \(\lambda_ 1\leq n+\epsilon\) is homeomorphic to the n-sphere. The answer is no as the examples of this paper show. The construction of these examples is explicitly carried out on the connected sum \({\mathbb{C}}{\mathbb{P}}^ 2\#{\mathbb{C}}{\mathbb{P}}^ 2\) using formulae for the curvature of warped product metrics. It is pointed out how this construction also works on \({\mathbb{C}}{\mathbb{P}}^ n\) for arbitrary dimension n.